Yesterday, I stood and watched a magpie winkling bites from the suet feeder
Which hangs off my porch rail–made fetching by a tin beak, tail, painted wings, and the wire feet of a northern flicker. (I had to look that up on Google.)
I watch often. And now that we have snow, I watch for the dainty footsteps of visiting birds and the peripatetic tail swishes of a squirrel.
I offer sunflower seeds and three kinds of suet and a heated birdbath/drinking fountain.
Risking multicolored plops of poop on the white railings.
All new for me this year.
I am so not a birder.
I maybe recognize half a dozen species and guess at the rest.
I’m a fool for robins–and the songs they sing from summer treetops at the edge of night.
I risk driving off highways to follow hawks riding the air and eyeing gophers.
Ian Tyson long since sealed my enchantment with magpies:
Magpie
You’re an early riser
Magpie
You’re a bold chastiser
Magpie
Always waking up my wife and I
You old coyote in the sky
Magpie
Some say you’re a bold deceiver
I say you’re a true believer
Magpie
You know the west ain’t never going to die
Just as long as you can fly*
So, I am uncommonly pleased, surprised, touched to watch a magpie just feet from my own warm inside perch.
To feel as if he’s come to visit me.
And then a faraway memory of the Grandma Kitty Christmas story floats to the surface. Grandma Kitty being Dave’s grandmother.
She sometimes lived with Dave’s family, but more often stayed in a Wisconsin old folks’ home.
The family regularly failed to think up good Christmas gift ideas. She needed nothing, really.
But outside her rest home room they’d hung a bird feeder.
So, Eureka, bird seed!
Which meant that one Christmas she unwrapped not one but four or five bags of bird seed from under the Christmas tree. Each giver unaware of the others’ choice.
Dave told the story with laughter–like that of the family as Grandma Kitty unveiled one sack of seed after another.
I may have become Grandma Kitty.
I don’t need much of anything in the way of earthly goods. In fact, I keep winnowing belongings. Not perhaps, to nursing home constraints, but for sure to honor these small spaces.
My life is more circumscribed, too, cautious. Do I honestly want to run errands in the snow, wobbly and timid as I am in these Covid times?
So yes, I love to see the world from my window.
And escape my four walls on the wings of a mischievous magpie and the life I imagine he lives in our big sky.
To glow in the satisfaction of being a worthy host to a friend so exotic. ©
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Uf3SdvGrAE
